Scott Reid

[Employment Insurance, September 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the publicly stated promise of performance for employment insurance states that when a Canadian loses his or her job, the claim should be processed in 21 days and the first benefit cheque should arrive shortly after that.

In eastern Ontario the reality is a whole lot different. In August only 32% of claims were processed within this timeframe. Many laid off workers have to wait eight weeks or more. Callers to the information centre are advised it will take 15 days just to inform them of the status of their claims.

When will this unacceptable situation change?

[International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, September 24th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I am rising today in the House to ask the Minister of Transport about the serious state of highway 7 which extends southwest from Ottawa and cuts through my riding of Lanark--Carleton.

Highway 7 is the most direct route between Ottawa and Toronto. As such it is an important commuting, trucking and bus route. It has the potential to be used more than it currently is although the highway is quite overloaded.

The Ottawa area has experienced an economic boom in recent years. Businesses and commuters have started to spread beyond Kanata and into the towns of Carleton Place and Perth. This movement of people and capital has served to increase traffic and trucking volume on highway 7 which is becoming an increasingly important artery.

The mayor of Carleton Place, Brian Costello, has been very vocal in calling for a widening of the roadway into a four lane divided highway. MPP Norm Sterling, who is my counterpart at Queen's Park, has signalled that the highway is a top priority for the provincial government.

On behalf of all the residents in my riding I thank both those gentlemen for their hard work. However the people of Lanark--Carleton need to see results. There have yet to be any funds allocated or a completion date set.

I last stood in the House and spoke to the issue on two occasions in April and May of this year. I asked for a serious federal commitment to infrastructure spending so that long overdue projects like the widening of highway 7 could go forth.

When I addressed the issue in April I spoke of safety as a primary concern. I said at the time that highway 7 had seen 11 fatal accidents in Lanark--Carleton in the past few years. Since I made those remarks the same stretch of highway has seen three additional deaths over the summer as well as a series of serious injuries related to traffic accidents. This is not just a question of commuting and commerce. It is a question of life and death.

The province of Ontario has earmarked $70 million for infrastructure improvements in the Ottawa area. What has the federal government done?

The U.S. federal government collects $25 billion in gas tax revenues and spends $21 billion of it on roads and highways. Eighty-four per cent of the revenue is dedicated to road and highway improvement. What about Canada?

Canadian federal gasoline taxes have increased by more than 500% between 1985 and the present, from 1.5 cents per litre to 10 cents per litre. The tax was originally intended to be a direct source of revenue for highway improvements.

Over $4.7 billion was collected in federal taxes last year. Yet only 4% of the funds were returned to the provinces by way of provincial transfers for road and highway development. The dollar figure was in the area of a mere $190 million. As though that were not bad enough, 96% of this pittance was spent east of the Ontario-Quebec border. That means that Ontario, by far the largest source of highway improvement taxes, is getting virtually nothing for its highway needs.

Federal transfers for highways continue to drop in dollar value while gas tax revenues, ostensibly highway improvement revenues, go up by hundreds of millions of dollars.

I fully realize that the federal government has many competing demands on the treasury. However this is an issue of fundamental importance to economic expansion, prosperity and human safety.

Could the Minister of Transport tell us what is happening to the $4.7 billion in highway improvement taxes? How many more people must die before the federal government uses the money for the purpose for which it is being raised: to expand and improve the safety of our highways?

[Customs Act, September 21st, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I object to the entire direction that the hon. member took during his speech; his references to goose stepping and American militarism. Maybe he was watching a different television feed than I was last week, but the United States was attacked. Several thousand Americans did die in an unprovoked attack upon civilian targets, people who went about their peaceful business. People of all races, all colours and all religions were killed. We are hearing that attempts to deal with this are somehow comparable to the sorts of things that Adolf Hitler did. For goodness, sake this is an offence. This should be withdrawn.

[Terrorism, September 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I will repeat what the minister refers to as rumour and innuendo. This individual had been deported from Canada, had re-entered the country illegally, had been arrested carrying a false Canadian passport, citizenship card and SIN card and had been charged by U.S. authorities for a stabbing in Boston.

The IRB adjudicator in the case admitted that he was not someone who could be trusted to simply appear at a future hearing but released him anyway. Why will the government not agree to detain or deport immediately any failed refugee claimant with links to terrorism who break Canadian laws?

[Terrorism, September 21st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Nabil Al-Marabh, who had been connected with two of the World Trade Center hijackers, was under arrest in Canada but the IRB released him.

The minister said that we cannot detain or deport persons on the basis of what she calls rumour and innuendo. The evidence against Mr. Al-Marabh was that he had been arrested on stabbing charges in Boston, that he had attempted to illegally enter the United States, that he had illegally re-entered Canada, that he was carrying a forged passport, that he was carrying a forged citizenship card and that he was carrying a forged social insurance card.

Why was this real evidence and not rumour or innuendo, not enough to detain or deport this suspected terrorist?

[Supply, June 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, of course the answer is yes. I came here with fewer illusions than some members because I had worked as an adviser on the Hill before being elected. I realized that private members had limited influence on the major agenda of the day. It struck me that it therefore made sense to try to be as good a constituency representative as possible.

There are any number of local issues that might not come to the attention of ministers and the ministry. It is only natural that issues which are important locally would not emerge at the national level.

I will cite a couple of issues of interest. I will bring before the House, among other things, the issue of one of the highways that goes through my riding, Highway 7. It has come to be known as the killer strip due to the large number of fatal accidents that occur on it. It is a two lane highway with a very high traffic volume.

The issue of level crossings is an area of federal jurisdiction because rails are within federal jurisdiction. Every town in the Ottawa valley has level crossings. The funding formula for providing warning signs is arcane and hard to work with. In my home town of Carleton Place the street I live on has low traffic volume and uses wig-wags. The major street in town uses only lights to warn of a coming train. This sort of thing has recently led to a fatality in the Ottawa valley.

There are other issues of importance on a different level. Religious freedom in China is of great importance to me and to some of my constituents who are practitioners of Falun Gong. Some of them have friends or relatives in China who have been arrested for practising their faith. These are some of the issues it would be nice to put before the House and see come to a vote.

[Supply, June 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Yellowhead. It is a great pleasure to rise today to address the motion put forward by my hon. colleague from Yorkton—Melville. I wish to unequivocally state my 100% support for the motion.

For the benefit of the vast audience out there in TV land watching the debate, I will begin by explaining what private members' business is and why it is so vital to our democratic process that the mechanism be strengthened from its current form.

In our parliamentary system the vast majority of time, resources and attention is devoted to government legislation. Bills introduced by ministers of the crown further the political agenda of the government of the day. However we as members of parliament are elected by our constituents to represent them here, rather than to represent this place to them, and to raise their issues of concern. As most of parliament's time is devoted to government legislation, our opportunity to act in a legislative capacity on behalf of the people we represent falls to the one hour of debate each day that is allotted to private members' business.

To give our audience an appreciation of the frustration that MPs feel over private members' business and the process through which it is chosen, I will briefly review it.

Hundreds of bills and motions are introduced in the House of Commons. Each one represents hours upon hours or in some cases days and weeks of research and work, but most never see the light of day. In order for a bill to actually be debated in the House, an MP's name must first be drawn from a lottery. The competition is fierce. There are 301 MPs with just one hour a day, one item per day, and approximately 135 sitting days per year. The math should be evident to everyone, particularly to my hon. colleague from Elk Island.

When and if a member's name is finally drawn, he or she can put forward a bill for debate and then the real challenge begins. Having beaten the odds and come this far, the bill in question is still not even eligible for a vote in the House of Commons. This means that we end up using the precious little time we have available to debate motions and bills which simply disappear upon the expiry of their one hour debate. Such non-votable bills and motions have absolutely no chance whatsoever of becoming law. It is debate for debate's sake and in my opinion it is a waste of valuable time.

If we as members of parliament want our issues to come to a vote, we must appear as witnesses before a special subcommittee to plead our case and argue why our bill or motion should be granted one of ten designations of votable status. The rules of the House explicitly ensure that most private members' business, if debated, does not get to a vote.

To make matters worse for opposition members, many of whom naively look to private members' business as their sole source of parliamentary effectiveness, the government maintains a majority of members on the subcommittee that decides which precious few bills become votable and which ones get to be a waste of valuable time. The government can use this majority to ensure that issues which run too contrary to the government's own vision have no chance of being subject to a vote in the House of Commons and therefore becoming law.

The very lucky items which, against all odds, are drafted, tabled, drawn, argued and finally awarded votable status go through a slightly different process. They get three hours of debate, one hour at a time, separated by about 30 sitting days, which means that in reality it takes about half the year just to get through the first stage of debate and come to an initial vote.

In the very exceptional circumstances when the government cannot force its own MPs to vote to kill a private member's bill, it has other levers to kill private members' bills more quietly.

First, if a bill passes second reading and is referred to a committee for further review, the government uses its numerical dominance of the committee to simply see to it that the item on the agenda mysteriously never comes up for consideration before the House has prorogued. The bill is thus buried in committee and never seen again.

Second, another famous tactic, one which the government employed against one of its own members in the last parliament, is strong arming its committee members to debate every clause of the bill and report the bill back to the House as a blank piece of paper. This actually happened, as the member for Mississauga East can attest. It is one of the greatest affronts to representative democracy that we have seen.

Third, failing even such draconian measures, if a private member's bill hypothetically manages to pass all stages of debate in the House of Commons, it must be brought forth for debate in the Senate. The Senate is faced with the same issue of whether or not it is to be given votable status in the other place. Our colleague from Scarborough Southwest has fallen victim to this sort of game in the previous parliament.

Finally, these measures are not even necessary. The whole private members' process is so drawn out that most bills and motions end up dying somewhere on the order paper when an election is called. I hope this summary serves to illustrate the absolute futility of the current private members' process. A mechanism which should be the greatest tool of parliamentarians becomes a joke.

The process is designed to be merely a show and to maintain absolute government control over what happens in the federal legislative sphere. Individual representatives of the citizens of Canada do not have the means to overcome government partisanship and to effect real legislative measures that matter to their constituents.

Private members' business has evolved dramatically since Confederation. We have tried models ranging from entire private members' days to the current system of one hour per day every day of the week.

Our current structure originates with the McGrath report of 1985 which established the votability rules and the lottery system that created the order of precedence for debate. The McGrath report summarized the state of private members' business when it stated:

The House does not attach any great importance to private members' business as it is now organized. Our proposals are designed to achieve a number of improvements in the way private members' business is dealt with. They would tighten the conditions of the ballot, widen the scope of private members' legislation, and ensure that some private members' bills and motions come to a vote.

It is evident that the democratic bar was already so low that a major objective of the single and greatest private members' business reform had to be to ensure that some private members' bills and motions came to a vote. The low bar has meant that the reformed system, with some minor subsequent reforms, has led to the mediocrity with which we operate today.

The single greatest impediment to the effectiveness of private members' business is votability. While other matters of procedure also require attention, I would argue that by the very act of making all private members' legislation votable we would be forcing the House to take private members' business seriously. Members would attend the debates and consult their constituents over the issues put forth.

Among the defenders of the status quo the same arguments tend to resurface. I will recount just a few. First, non-votable bills are useful because they raise awareness of issues. This argument is uneconomical. Why not raise awareness of important issues and give the House the power to pronounce upon them without having to repeat the process at a later time? Private members' business is scarce enough as it is.

Second, if all bills were votable, fewer bills would be considered because of the differential in debate time between votable and non-votable items. This argument is also an obfuscation. I believe that all members of this place would gladly see a reduction in the debatable time to a standard one hour if it meant their bills would have a hope of actually coming to a vote. This solution would increase the number of bills considered in the current structure.

Third, a democratically elected majority government should have control of the legislative agenda and not cede it to opposition members. Such an argument is an insult to opposition members and government backbenchers alike. The regional cleavages in Canada dictate that if private members' business is shut down then certain regions are effectively shut out of the legislative process.

Furthermore I would argue that if a government is scared of ideas and of free votes in the Commons it is no longer deserving of the right to govern. How much more legitimate can a government be than if it allows absolute freedom to debate and freedom to vote while still maintaining the confidence of members of the House?

Does general votability work? I want to point to a few examples. The Quebec standing orders state that apart from being referred to a committee before second reading “the general rules pertaining to bills shall apply to private bills”. The Alberta standing orders state that “the standing orders relating to public bills apply to private bills”. The Ontario rules state that the speaker is to put the question at 12 noon each Thursday for all private members' bills considered that week. They all get a vote.

I urge all members of the House to look upon today's debate as a golden opportunity to restore an important pillar of democracy to our assembly. In an age where power is increasingly concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office, and where party whips dangle carrots of travel or promotion in exchange for obedience, we must stand guard against allowing our House of Commons to become a technical afterthought to elite decision making.

We as individual members have the power today to support the motion and take back a part of the democratic power that has been bestowed upon us by our constituents and is a vital institution of the Westminster parliamentary system of which we are proud to be a part.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 7th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, on June 27, 1788, the Virginia ratifying convention proposed a series of amendments to the draft federal constitution then before that body. It was understood by all participants in the debate over whether to ratify the proposed new constitution of the United States that if Virginia did not sign on, the new constitution would be stillborn.

The Virginia delegates made it clear that their ratification was conditional upon the adoption of the larger portion of the 20 proposed changes to the body of the constitution they had set forth. These amendments dealt with freedom of speech, the independence of the judiciary, freedom of religion, the right to own property, and other key rights.

One of the amendments, which is relevant to today's debate read as follows. It resolved:

That the laws ascertaining the compensation to Senators and Representatives for their services be postponed in their operation, until after the election of Representatives immediately succeeding the passing thereof—

This proposed amendment was the intellectual origin and the genesis of the primary principle underlying my decision to vote against the legislation before us.

The list of proposed amendments was taken to the first session of the United States' congress by one of Virginia's greatest sons, James Madison. From it and similar lists forwarded by the ratifying conventions of the other states, Madison and his colleagues cobbled together a series of 12 amendments which, on September 25, 1789, were duly enacted by a two-thirds majority of each of the two houses of congress and sent to the states for ratification.

At this point the wording had been somewhat altered to read thus:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Unlike all but one of the other amendments approved that day, the amendment on congressional pay was not immediately adopted by a three-fourths majority of the 13 states. Perhaps this was because legislators in those days were modest in their salary demands and there was no need to place controls on their ability to set their own levels of compensation.

Times change. The willingness of elected representatives to compensate themselves generously grew to the point that by the 1980s a Texas legislative aide, Gregory Watson, felt compelled to take up the cause. He built a cross-country coalition that convinced the legislatures of 32 states to complete the ratification process. With the simultaneous ratification on May 7, 1992, of the Michigan and New Jersey state legislatures, Madison's proposal became the 27th amendment to the United States' constitution.

I have engaged in this long historical digression to make as pointed a contrast as possible between the right way of reforming parliamentary compensation and the mess that presents itself to us today.

Following the 2000 election, a commission, headed by former cabinet minister Ed Lumley, prepared a series of recommendations on MP salaries and compensation. Its report was made public last week. Some of its proposals strike me as excellent, particularly those which would moderate the accrual rate for the MP pension plan and which call for openness in reporting MPs' incomes.

I had not known until last week that my total compensation package under the existing byzantine structure of salary and tax free allowances added up to $109,000 per year.

Other aspects of the Lumley report, such as the proposal to tie MPs' salaries to those of judges, strikes me as less satisfactory. A linkage to private sector compensation would in my mind have been preferable.

However, the Lumley report is not the problem. It is an impartial public servant's attempt to come to a reasonable solution to the question of MP compensation. What has been distressing beyond all measure has been the government's reaction to the report.

In the past week we have seen the government fiddle with the accrual rate of the MP pension plan. According to Walter Robinson of the National Taxpayers Association, it has done so to goose up the size of payouts by as much as 42%, make the pay retroactive to a point far in advance of the date suggested by Mr. Lumley, and insert an odious and offensive opt out clause to allow it to tar any member who votes against the bill with the spurious charge of hypocrisy.

Each of these actions is an offence but the last one is so bad that I urge every member of the House, regardless of his or her intentions with regard to opting in or opting out, to vote against the entire bill on this basis alone.

The worst part of the government's reaction to the Lumley report has surely been its unseemly haste to ram the legislation through in record time.

So great was the government's haste that time allocation was imposed on the debate in the House. The committee of the whole that met yesterday had only a few hours to discuss the details of the bill. Each of us was permitted to raise questions only once, thereby preventing the kind of two way exchange that might have shed more light on important details of Bill C-28.

So great was the government's haste that its translation of the bill from English to French contained numerous mistakes which had to be corrected by amendments in committee.

So great was the government's haste that at committee stage it failed to group consequential amendments to the bill as is the normal practice.

Finally, the government's haste was so great that many members, myself included, were unable to flip through our sheaves of proposed amendments before the votes had been commenced on them. We therefore voted in complete ignorance or had to abstain from voting so as not to vote inappropriately.

All of this does the government a great discredit.

I will say for the record that there are many members in the House who deserve the increase on which we will be voting this afternoon. There are some for whom the services to their country that they are providing here, that they have provided here and that in many cases they will continue to provide here, far outweigh any level of compensation they will see.

For that reason I would never condemn a fellow member regardless of how he or she chooses to vote, whether he or she chooses to opt into the pension plan, the pay raise or the whole package, but I cannot and will not set aside any kind word for the process by which the raise is being rammed through. It is wrong and I will be voting against it.

I urge every fellow member of the House to do the same, regardless of party affiliation and regardless of his or her intentions with respect to the pay raise.

[Parliament Of Canada Act, June 6th, 2001]

Mr. Chairman, my congratulations to you for your remarkable ability to remember everyone when we are sitting in different seats.

I want to return to what the government House leader was saying earlier. He expressed concern about the fact that he now earns less than his assistant deputy minister. Obviously Canadians' hearts will bleed at the thought that the minister would be earning less than one of the highest paid civil servants in the country.

I want to point out that it is not a unique situation. We find junior officers in the Canadian military who earn less than chief warrant officers, based on the fact that the non-commissioned officer has some form of superior expertise.

I would like to ask the government House leader some questions which relate to opting out. First, am I to understand that the extra stipends paid to MPs who serve in some post or capacity other than as members of parliament, for example as chair or vice chair of a committee or as a party leader or a House leader, can opt out of one of those or are they mandatory without an opting out clause?

The second question relates to opting out permanently. I gather it would mean that in the next election should someone on this side opt out, the voters would know that the Liberal candidate opposing him or her, for example, would be paid more following the election than that incumbent MP, and that in future elections that difference would grow over time.

Does the inflation rate clause mentioned in his previous comments apply in perpetuity as well for those who opt out? Can we assume that over time the differential will grow and grow?

[Supply, May 31st, 2001]

Madam Speaker, in his comments the hon. member for Winnipeg—Transcona seems to put a great deal of faith in future federal governments acting responsibly in the use of a spending power they have not used responsibly in the past.

I am willing to accept that if the hon. member were to find himself as prime minister in the future he would make transfers for health care his top priority and would do whatever was necessary. However I think he and I would both agree that it is unlikely he will be prime minister in the future.

Based on a record in which the federal government has gone from 50 cent dollars down to 15 cent dollars before more cash was put in, although we are certainly nowhere close to the 50 cent mark, we have seen the federal government effectively renege on the greater share of its health care funding.

Given that, I find it difficult to understand why he feels that is the responsible route when we are concerned about health care transfers. It seems we must find a way of binding the federal government's hands and requiring that those transfers be made. Tax points do that.

Perhaps there are other methods, but I do not see them being proposed at the moment. This seems to be the best option realistically available to us. It has the additional advantage of putting more money into provincial hands as the needs of an aging population grow and as the economies of those provinces grow. There are some other advantages that go along with encouraging prudent fiscal management in the provinces.

If we say that health care and national standards are the goal, it seems to me we are better off ensuring an adequate and growing source of funding than using any other means available to us. I cannot see how we can get around that. I wonder if the hon. member could enlighten me on this point.